I realized I forgot to clarify in the original post, I'm running an updated version of Windows XP MCE (updated using legacy update)

To get this out of the way: most cards of this type have small fans, or no fan at all, and low profile cases often have limited air flow, so an overheating card is my first suspicion. Have you monitored the card's temps with something like GPU-Z?

Repo Man11 wrote on 2025-10-29, 21:43:

To get this out of the way: most cards of this type have small fans, or no fan at all, and low profile cases often have limited air flow, so an overheating card is my first suspicion. Have you monitored the card's temps with something like GPU-Z?

Thanks Repo Man,

I haven't monitored the temps specifically using something like GPU-Z, but I did a trial with the case open and saw no difference (both of my card variants had one fan). Also, I used DDU to uninstall each set of drivers, and I eventually installed a radeon HD 5570 I had lying around (also low profile with only one small fan), which supposedly has a TDP of 39W, whereas my GT 730 supposedly has a TDP of 38 W, so I don't think it's temps, but I'm going to try one even older driver than the ones I've tried for video, and I'll try monitoring the temps a bit too to see what I get. Any other thoughts?

Worst case is I'll finish off trying out the other 'major' supposedly-compatible cards, and if none of those work, I might even try installing windows xp professional edition on a different drive in place of my MCE drive, and see if any of those drivers have better compatibility with xp professional. I know I installed the gtx 750 ti (probably with one of the same drivers I've already tried) on a windows xp x64 edition pc, and it didn't seem to have any issues, so I'm really at a loss on this one, unless either a) the gt 730 is more finicky with drivers or b) windows xp Media Center Edition is more finicky with video drivers

- RubDub

RubDub2k wrote on 2025-10-29, 21:37:

I've got an old slim dell vostro 200 with an intel e8600 cpu and 4gb of memory (pretty good specs for a low profile machine to run XP), but I wanted to make sure it could hold up graphically as well in 2000-2006 era games. I have 2 different low-profile variants of NVIDIA's gt 730 (An HP OEM and some other one, both supposedly 2gb), and I attempted installing both into this machine using 3 different driver versions (368.81, 355.98, 347.88, all supposedly for windows xp), and both cards would run a 3dmark06 test great (around 11,700 marks or so), but if I left the demo looping for 30min-3hrs, it would *always* eventually bluescreen

Below are my notes regarding the GT 710 on Windows XP 32-bit. I still have this system running.

Posted April 7, 2021
With v347.09 brief testing, I have seen one hang with 3Dmark2001SE. Showing a benchmark intro screen, about to fade in, but it remains very dark forever. Two other runs; no problem. Driver v368.91 had this same issue quite regularly, maybe like half the benchmark runs got stuck like that. With v344.75 I have never seen this hang, despite that I have benchmarked it a dozen times now

https://msfn.org/board/topic/182534-geforce-g … ows-xp-findings

gerwin wrote on Yesterday, 02:06:

Below are my notes regarding the GT 710 on Windows XP 32-bit. I still have this system running.

Posted April 7, 2021
With v347.09 brief testing, I have seen one hang with 3Dmark2001SE. Showing a benchmark intro screen, about to fade in, but it remains very dark forever. Two other runs; no problem. Driver v368.91 had this same issue quite regularly, maybe like half the benchmark runs got stuck like that. With v344.75 I have never seen this hang, despite that I have benchmarked it a dozen times now

https://msfn.org/board/topic/182534-geforce-g … ows-xp-findings

Thanks Gerwin, success! I tried v344.75, ran two 3dmark06 benches no problem, then let it demo overnight and had no blue screens or freezes! Looks like NVIDIA 700 series driver versions are just really sensitive on xp... hopefully this will help somebody in the future running into the same issue. Cheers,

- RubDub

RubDub2k wrote on Yesterday, 18:37:

Thanks Gerwin, success! I tried v344.75, ran two 3dmark06 benches no problem, then let it demo overnight and had no blue screens or freezes! Looks like NVIDIA 700 series driver versions are just really sensitive on xp... hopefully this will help somebody in the future running into the same issue. Cheers,

- RubDub

Glad it passed your overnight test. Driver v344.75 wins again.